Arab activist balks at guilty plea in Detroit

5/21/14 10:38 PM EDT

An Arab-American activist charged with concealing her role in bombings in Jerusalem more than four decades ago backed away from a potential plea deal at a court hearing in Detroit on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press and one of the woman's associates.

Federal prosecutors offered Rasmea Odeh a plea deal under which she would serve no more than six months in jail and be free in the U.S. for six months before being deported, the AP said. She would also have lost her U.S. citizenship.

Both sides halted pretrial litigation a couple of months ago over the criminal case charging her with felony naturalization fraud, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. POLITICO reported last week that U.S. District Judge Paul Borman had cancelled a pretrial conference and scheduled a plea hearing, a move that usually signals a guilty plea is about to be offered as part of a plea bargain.

However, at the hearing Wednesday, Odeh said she wants a new lawyer and wants to go to trial rather than plead guilty, the AP reported.

Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of a Chicago-based group Odeh worked with — the Arab-American Action Network, said the charges against Odeh were unwarranted.

"She has committed no crime and the government has no case. She has been in this country for 20 years, a citizen for 10 of them, and an upstanding one at that," Abudayyeh said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. "She works closely with Black, Latino, Asian, white, and other communities in Chicago, to promote multiculturalism, racial and social justice. She who is supported so broadly by colleagues in Chicago that she was awarded an Outstanding Community Leader award by the Chicago Cultural Alliance in 2013."

Prosecutors say that when Odeh came to the United States in 1995, she didn't reveal her affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or that she had spent more than a decade in an Israeli jail after being convicted by a military court of planting bombs in a supermarket and at the British Consulate in Jerusalem in 1969. One of the bombs killed two people.

A prosecutor told the court that the plea deal would remain on the table for a short time, the AP reported, adding that Borman continued the case for a week so Odeh could appear with a new lawyer.